She wanted to be changed, she recalls in “How Coffee Saved My Life: And Other Stories of Stumbling to Grace” (Chalice Press, $16.99).

The process by which that transformation occurred may not have been one she would have pursued, however.

Not many people, I’d warrant, would opt for bouts with lice, mange, fleas and persistent digestive troubles. Few would choose sadness and isolation — in one journal entry included in her book, she writes of how she has failed, in another she writes of how she wants to give up.

Yet such experiences, along with other, much more pleasant ones, are what Roscher encountered as she traveled abroad as part of a program of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

The process of enduring, surviving and, eventually, discovering how to thrive in rural South America, left her a changed woman.

She learned, she writes, that she isn’t “an isolated woman from the United States” but part of a global community. She garnered new ideas about ministry. She embraced a different concept of success, one that didn’t include awards or test scores, but the ability to “eat odd parts of a cow with a game face” and believing that her worth did not “depend on (her) productivity.”

Those things may not have made her life easier.

Near the close of the book, after recounting her experiences on a return trip to the South American town where she lived, Roscher writes: “I can’t help but think that life would have been easier, neater, if I had never ventured to Uruguay the first time. I would have had a clearer sense of where home was, who family was, a less complex view of the world, less internal conflict when spending money or voting or choosing a job. ... The rest of my life will be different because of Lascano, Uruguay. Faith is not about clarity. Faith is not neat. Faith is about relishing, thriving in the muckiness of love.”

I’m not sure that I can hear such sentiment enough.

In the midst of a culture in which so much value is placed on particular products and individuals’ productivity, we want the clean, neat, easy thing, to find the formula that will lead us into elation. When such things prove elusive, we may question God or obsess over our own faith (or lack thereof).

Roscher’s work may help remind readers that simply because we live intentionally, not to mention with good intentions, life won’t unfold just as we’ve anticipated. But if we let go of our expectations and open our hearts, it just might turn out better than we could have hoped.

“The world does not yet reflect heaven,” she writes. “We get glimpses, but God calls us to be co-creators on earth, to usher in holiness, to erase boundaries, to laugh and break bread and transform and dance together, so that God’s community comes to here and now.”